King Crimson has garnered little radio or
music video airplay but gained a large
cult following. The band's debut
album, In the Court
of the Crimson King, is widely regarded as a landmark in
progressive rock, while later excursions into even more
unconventional territory have been influential on many contemporary
musical artists. King Crimson's membership has fluctuated
considerably throughout its existence, with eighteen musicians and
two lyricists passing through the ranks as full band members. The
band developed a greater degree of stability later on in its
history, with current (and fifth) frontman Adrian Belew having been a member of King
Crimson since 1981 and drummer Bill
Bruford staying with the band for nine years of active
existence (1973-75, 1981-84 and 1994-97)

Today, King Crimson's early music is considered to owe a lot to the
compositional frameworks of jazz innovators like Charles Mingus and John McLaughlin, fused with
British pop and classical music. The early 1970s were King
Crimson's least stable period, with many personnel changes and
disjunctions between studio and live sound as the band explored
elements of jazz, funk and
chamber classical music. In the mid-'70s the band had a more stable
lineup and developed an improvisational sound influenced by
hard rock, before breaking up in 1974. The
band re-formed with a new line-up in 1981 for three years (this
time influenced by New Wave and
gamelan music) before breaking up again for
around a decade. Following their 1994 reunion (with extra
personnel), King Crimson blended aspects of their 1980s and 1970s
sound with influences from more recent musical genres such as
industrial rock and grunge (the latter itself a genre initially
influenced by King Crimson). The band’s efforts to blend additional
elements into their music have continued into the 21st century,
with more recent developments including drum and bass-styled rhythm loops and
extensive use of MIDI and guitar
synthesis.

Leadership

Robert Fripp has been the sole consistent member throughout the
group’s history and acts as its de-facto leader, having put
together several distinct lineups. He has stated that he does not
necessarily consider himself the band's leader and instead
describes King Crimson as "a way of doing things". Fripp has also
noted that he never originally intended to be seen as the head of
the group.

However, Fripp has strongly dominated the band’s musical approach
and compositional approach since their second album, albeit with
other members tending to write the more song-oriented elements, to
the point where other members have left the band due to creative
frustration – notably Ian
McDonald, Gordon Haskell and
Mel Collins. Trey
Gunn, who played with the group between 1994 and 2003, has
stated that "King Crimson is Robert’s vision. Period."

History

1960s

Prehistory, including Giles, Giles and Fripp (1967-1968)

In August 1967, drummer Michael Giles
and his bass-playing brother Peter,
who’d been professional musicians in various jobbing bands since
their mid-teens, advertised for a singing organist to join their
new project. Robert
Fripp – a guitarist who did not sing – responded and
the trio formed the band Giles,
Giles and Fripp All three musicians were originally from the
Dorset area.

Based on a format of eccentric pop songs and complex instrumentals,
Giles, Giles and Fripp
recorded several unsuccessful singles and one album, The
Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp. The band hovered
on the edge of success, with several radio sessions and a
television appearance, but never scored the hit that would have
been crucial for a commercial breakthrough. The album was no more
of a success than the singles, and was even disparaged by Keith Moon of The Who in a
magazine review.

Attempting to expand their sound, the group then recruited the
multi-instrumentalist Ian
McDonald on keyboards, reeds
and woodwinds. McDonald brought along his then-girlfriend, the
former Fairport Convention
singer Judy Dyble, whose tenure with the
group was brief and ended at the same time as her romantic split
with McDonald (she would later resurface in Trader Horne).

More significantly, McDonald brought in lyricist, roadie and art
strategist Peter Sinfield, with whom
he had been writing songs – a partnership initiated when
McDonald had said to Sinfield, regarding his 1968 band Creation,
"Peter, I have to tell you that your band is hopeless, but you
write some great words. Would you like to get together on a couple
of songs?" One of the first songs McDonald and Sinfield wrote
together was "The Court of
the Crimson King".

Fripp,
meanwhile, had seen the band 1-2-3 (later known as Clouds) at the Marquee. This band would later inspire some of
Crimson's penchant for classical melodies and jazz-like
improvisation.

King Crimson, lineup 1 (1968-1969)

Formation (late 1968-mid-1969)

By this point, Fripp's dissatisfaction with Giles, Giles and
Fripp's lack of focus had come to a head. Feeling that he no longer
wished to pursue Peter Giles' more whimsical pop style, he
recommended his friend Greg Lake, a singer
and guitarist, for recruitment into the band, with the suggestion
that Lake should replace either Peter Giles or himself. Although
Peter Giles would later sardonically describe this as one of
Fripp's "cute political moves", he himself had become disillusioned
with Giles, Giles and Fripp's failure to break through, and stepped
down to be replaced by Lake as the band's bass player, singer and
frontman. At this point, the band morphed into what would become
King Crimson.

The first incarnation of the band was said to have been "conceived"
on 30 November 1968 and first rehearsed on 13 January 1969. The
name King Crimson was coined by lyricist Peter Sinfield as a synonym for Beelzebub, prince of demons. According to Fripp,
Beelzebub would be an anglicised
form of the Arabic phrase "B'il
Sabab", meaning "the man with an aim" – although it literally means
"with a cause".

Shortly afterward, the new band purchased a Mellotron (the first example of the band’s
persistent involvement with music technology) and began using it to
create an original orchestral rock sound which would be an
overwhelming influence on the nascent progressive rock movement. At
this point, McDonald was King Crimson’s main composer, albeit with
significant contributions from Lake and Fripp, while Sinfield not
only wrote all the lyrics but designed and operated the band’s
revolutionary stage lighting, and was therefore credited with
"sounds and visions".

King
Crimson made their live debut on 9 April 1969, and made a
breakthrough by playing the free concert in Hyde
Park, London, staged by
The Rolling Stones in July 1969
before 650,000 people.

In The Court Of The Crimson King (1969)

The first
King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson
King, was released in October on EG
Records, described by Fripp as "an instant smash" and "New York'sacid album of 1970" –
notwithstanding that Fripp and Giles claim that the band never used
psychedelic drugs. The album received public compliments
from Pete Townshend, The Who's guitarist, calling the album "an uncanny
masterpiece."

King Crimson’s music drew on a wide range of influences provided by
all five group members, including Jimi
Hendrix, romantic- and modernist-era classical music, folk, jazz, military music
(partially inspired by McDonald’s stint as an army musician),
ambient improvisation, Victoriana and
British pop. All of this was executed with
a precision and complexity previously unheard of in rock music,
with Sinfield’s dense and melodramatic lyrics (heavily loaded with
dense imagery, allusion and self-conscious poeticisms) completing
the package. The sound of the album has been described as setting
the "aural antecedent" for alternative
rock and grunge, whilst the softer tracks
are described as having an "ethereal" and "almost sacred"
feel.

It was definitely a break from the blues-based hard rock of the
contemporary British and American scenes, presenting a more
Europeanised approach which blended antiquity and modernity. Music
reviewer Annie Gaffney has written that King Crimson were credited
with starting the entire progressive
rock movement that was popular in the early 1970s.

First lineup disintegrates (mid-to-late 1969)

After playing shows in England, the band embarked on a tour of the
United States, performing alongside many contemporary popular
musicians and musical groups, and "astounding audiences and
critics" with their original sound.

However, creative tensions were developing within the band. Michael
Giles and Ian McDonald, still striving to cope with King Crimson’s
rapid success and the realities of life on the road, became uneasy
with the band’s direction. Although he was neither the dominant
composer in the band nor the frontman, Fripp was very much the
band’s driving force and spokesman, leading King Crimson into
progressively darker and more intense musical areas. McDonald and
Giles, now favouring a lighter and more romantic style of music,
were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with their position.

To Fripp’s horror, both McDonald and Giles resigned from the band
during the California tour. In order to salvage what he saw as the
most important elements of King Crimson, Fripp offered to resign
himself. McDonald and Giles apparently declared that the band was
“more (him) than them” and that they should therefore be the ones
to leave.

The
original line-up played their last show together in San Francisco
at the Fillmore
West on 16 December 1969. Live recordings of the
original King Crimson’s concerts were eventually released
twenty-seven years later in 1996 as the double/quadruple live album
Epitaph.

Ian McDonald and Michael Giles then formally left King Crimson to
pursue solo work, recording the semi-successful McDonald and Giles studio album in 1970
before dissolving their partnership. McDonald would later resurface
in Foreigner while Giles became a
session drummer.

1970s

The "interregnum"

From the start of 1970 until mid-1971, King Crimson remained in a
state of flux with fluctuating line-ups, thwarted tour plans and
difficulties in finding a satisfactory musical direction. This
period has subsequently been referred to as the "interregnum" - a
nickname implying that the "King" (King Crimson) was not properly
in place during this time. In retrospect, this interruption in
career momentum can also be seen as the reason why King Crimson
never attained the commercial heights of Genesis, Yes or
Emerson, Lake &
Palmer (all bands that had been profoundly influenced by King
Crimson’s initial work).

In The Wake Of Poseidon (1970)

Greg Lake was the next member to leave,
departing in early 1970 after being approached by Keith Emerson to
join what would become Emerson, Lake & Palmer. This
left Fripp as the only remaining musician in the band, taking on
part of the keyboard-playing role in addition to guitar. To
compensate, Sinfield increased his own creative role and began
developing his interest in synthesizers for use on subsequent
records.

Lake agreed to sing on the recordings for the band's developing
second album In the Wake of
Poseidon (negotiating to receive King Crimson's PA
equipment as payment). Eventually, he ended up singing on the
band's early 1970 single "Cat Food/Groon" and on all but one of the
album’s vocal tracks. The exception was "Cadence And Cascade",
which was sung by Fripp's old schoolfriend and teenage bandmate
Gordon Haskell. At one point, the
band considered hiring the then-unknown Elton
John (on spec) to be the album's singer, but decided against
it. Other former members and associates returned - as session
players only - for the Poseidon recordings, with all bass
parts being handled by Peter Giles and Michael Giles performing the
drumming. Mel Collins (formerly of the band Cirkus) contributed
saxophones and flute. Another key performer was jazz pianist
Keith Tippett, who became an integral
part of King Crimson's sound for the next few records (although
Fripp offered him full band membership, Tippett preferred to remain
as a studio collaborator and only performed live with the band
once).

In the Wake of
Poseidon was moderately well received on release, but was
criticised as sounding very similar in both style and content to
the band's debut album, to the point where it seemed like an
imitation. In hindsight the same can be said of the Beatles albums
"Rubber Soul" and "Revolver". With the album on sale, Fripp and
Sinfield remained in the awkward position of having King Crimson
material and releases available, but not having a band to play it.
In considerable desperation, Fripp persuaded Gordon Haskell to join
permanently as singer and bass player, and recruited drummer
Andy McCulloch, another
Dorset musician moving in the West London progressive rock circle,
who'd previously been a member of Shy Limbs and Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Mel
Collins was also retained as a full band member.

Lizard (1970)

Both Haskell and McCulloch joined King Crimson in time to
participate in the recording sessions for the band's third album,
Lizard, but had no say in
the writing of the material. Fripp and Sinfield, now effectively
equal artistic partners, had written the entire album themselves
and had also brought in a squad of jazz musicians to help record it
- Keith Tippett, cornet player Marc
Charig, trombonist Nick Evans and oboe player Robin Miller.
Jon Anderson of Yes was also brought in to perform vocals on one
song ("Prince Rupert Awakes") which Fripp and Sinfield considered
to be outside Haskell’s range and style.

Lizard featured much
stronger avant-garde jazz and chamber-classical influences than
previous albums, as well as Sinfield’s upfront experiments with
processing and distorting sound through the VCS3
synthesizer. It also featured Sinfield’s most complex set of
allusive lyrics to date, including a coded song about the break-up
of the Beatles, with almost the entire second side taken up by a
predominantly instrumental chamber suite describing a mediaeval
battle and its outcome. The album is still described as being an
"acquired taste".

Lizard was definitely not to
the taste of the more rhythm-and-blues orientated Haskell and
McCulloch, who did not enjoy the sessions and rapidly became
disillusioned. Growing tensions came to a head when Haskell quit
the band acrimoniously prior to the release of the album. He had
realised that not only would he have no creative input for the
foreseeable future, and would be playing material that he had no
sympathy for, but would be required to sing through distortion and
electronic effects. McCulloch also quit immediately afterwards: he
would join Arthur Brown's
band and would become the drummer for Greenslade in 1972.

King Crimson, lineup 2 (1971-1972)

Building a new live band (early-mid 1971)

Fripp and Sinfield returned to the arduous process of auditioning
new members. Ian Wallace – a
former bandmate of Jon Anderson -
became the new drummer and was soon joined by singer Raymond "Boz" Burrell, who’d previously worked
with his own band Boz People, released a few obscure solo singles
and at one point had been tipped to replace Roger Daltrey in The
Who. Boz was chosen over other auditionees including Bryan Ferry and even King Crimson’s then-manager
John Gaydon.

Bassist-singer John Wetton (ex Mogul Thrash) was invited to join the group in
mid-1971 but he declined, accepting a place in Family instead, although he kept in touch with
Fripp. Rick Kemp was eventually selected
as the new bass player but turned the band down at the last minute.
Once again faced with limited choices, Fripp taught Boz to play the
bass rather than start the search all over again. Boz had not
played bass before, but had played enough occasional rhythm guitar
to make learning the instrument easier.

In 1971, King Crimson undertook their first tour since 1969 with
the new line-up. The concerts were well received, but the drug-free
and intellectually-inclined Fripp began to find himself at odds
with the more rock-and-roll lifestyle and musical inclinations of
the other members and began to withdraw socially from his
colleagues. The tension spread to the rest of the band, but the
band completed the tour intact.

Islands (late 1971)

Later in the year King Crimson recorded and released a new album,
Islands. The
band's warmest-sounding record to date, it was strongly influenced
by Miles Davis’ orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans and had a
loose thematic connection with Homer’s
Odyssey. It also showed signs of a
stylistic divergence between Sinfield (who favoured the softer and
more textural jazz-folk approach) and Fripp (who was becoming more
drawn to the harsher instrumental style exemplified by the
Mellotron-and-banjo-technique-guitar piece “Sailor’s Tale”).
Islands also featured the band’s one-and-only experiment
with a string ensemble (“Prelude: Song of the Gulls”) and the
raunchy rhythm-and-blues-inspired “Ladies of the Road” - by far the
closest representation of the band’s live style, and probably the
only track which the whole band liked. A hint of trouble to come
came when one unnamed member of the band allegedly described some
of the more delicate and meditative parts of Islands as
“airy-fairy shit”.

Split with Peter Sinfield, temporary band breakup (late
1971)

Following the next tour, Fripp ousted Sinfield , with whom his
relationship had deteriorated, claiming musical differences and a
loss of faith in his partner’s ideas. Sinfield would go on to
release a solo album, Still, featuring all of the current
and previous members of King Crimson aside from Fripp, and then
reunited with Greg Lake by becoming the principal lyricist for
Emerson, Lake &
Palmer. Many years later, he would achieve great success
writing pop songs for Bucks
Fizz.

The remaining band broke up acrimoniously in rehearsals shortly
afterwards, due to Fripp’s refusal to incorporate other members’
compositions into the band’s repertoire. (He later cited this as
“quality control” and an attempt to ensure that King Crimson was
performing the “right kind” of music.)

The last tour of lineup 2 (early-mid 1972)

The band was persuaded to reform in order to fulfil their 1972 tour
commitments, with the intention of disbanding afterwards.
Recordings from this tour were later released as the Earthbound live album,
noted and criticised for its bootleg-level sound quality and a
style which occasionally veered towards funk,
with scat singing on the improvised
pieces. This was a flagrant sign of the musical rift between Fripp
and all three of the other members, the latter of whom were
attempting to steer the band back towards a rootsier
rhythm-and-blues style in open defiance of Fripp.

Despite these problems, relationships across the band gradually
improved during the tour to the point where Collins, Burrell and
Wallace offered to continue with the band. However, Fripp had
already decided to entirely restructure King Crimson with a new
musical direction which he felt was entirely unsuited to the
current band, and was already recruiting new members.

After leaving King Crimson, Collins, Wallace and Burrell formed a
band called Snape, with British blues guitarist Alexis Korner. Both Wallace and Collins would
go on to outstanding session careers (Collins would also have a
stint in Camel and Wallace’s final
musical project in the late 2000s would be a jazz trio reinventing
King Crimson music). In 1973, Burrell became the bass player of
Bad Company with whom he enjoyed great
success for the rest of the decade. He would subsequently play down
any mention of his time with King Crimson.

Having spent a long time being critically overshadowed by the
preceding and subsequent lineups of King Crimson, the
Islands lineup of the band benefited from positive
reappraisal in the mid-2000s following the release of several live
archive releases (including the double live set Ladies of the
Road and various King Crimson Collectors Club recordings) and
reassessments by Fripp and other band members. Fripp would
subsequently mend his damaged relationships with Wallace and
Collins, although not with Burrell.

King Crimson, lineup 3 (mid-1972-1974)

The third major lineup of King Crimson was radically different from
the previous two and the interregnum work, being both the first
without saxophone or woodwind and the first to embrace active
improvisation as a major musical element

Recruiting (mid-1972)

Fripp’s first new recruit was the free-improvisingpercussionistJamie Muir, who had previously worked with
Sunship and Derek Bailey. In the first
of King Crimson’s “double drummer” lineups, he was paired with
former Yes drummer Bill Bruford, who had chosen to leave the
commercially successful Yes at the peak
of their early career in favour of the comparatively unstable and
unpredictable King Crimson. Fripp also finally secured John Wetton as King Crimson’s singer and bass
player, recruiting him directly from Family, and the lineup was completed by
David Cross, a relatively
unknown violinist who doubled on keyboards (Fripp had encountered
Cross through work with music colleges).

With Sinfield gone, the band recruited a new lyricist, Wetton's
friend Richard Palmer-James,
the former rhythm guitarist for Supertramp). Unlike Sinfield, Palmer-James’
contributions to King Crimson were confined to lyrics only. He
played no part in artistic, visual or sonic direction, and would
never appear on stage with the band, sending his lyrics to Wetton
by post from his home in Hamburg.

Larks' Tongues In Aspic and tour (late 1972)

Rehearsals and touring began in late 1972, with the new band’s
penchant for improvisation (and Jamie Muir’s startling wild-man
stage presence) immediately gaining King Crimson some excited press
attention. A new album Larks' Tongues in Aspic
was released early the next year. It was the first King Crimson
record to demonstrate Fripp’s dominant compositional vision
(without either the template of Ian McDonald's songwriting and
arrangements or the influence of Sinfield’s elaborate conceptual
lyrics and references) and in that sense was the first King Crimson
record to escape from the shadow of the debut album.

Larks' Tongues in
Aspic was notable for its revolutionary sound and a use of
dynamics that was extreme even by King Crimson standards
(exemplified by such pieces as the two-part title track),
which was a significant change from what King Crimson had done
before, and drew from influences as diverse as Bartok, the free music scene, Vaughan Williams and the embryonic
heavy metal sound. Muir’s
freewheeling approach to percussion and “found” instrumentation –
utilising everything from a prepared drumkit to bicycle-horn bulbs,
toys, bullroarers, gongs hit with chains, foley-style sound effects and a joke
laughing-bag – permeated the record and revolutionised Bruford’s
own approach to percussion. Wetton’s loud, crisp and overdriven
playing style provided King Crimson’s most distinctive bass playing
to date, while Fripp’s guitar playing had taken on a wiry and
aggressive character previously seldom heard in the band’s studio
recordings. There were some nods to the past in the band’s
continued use of Mellotron, mostly for the melodic ballads, but the
band now had more of a small ensemble sound, partly down to Cross’
solo violin, and the emphasis was now moving towards the
instrumentals.

Departure of Jamie Muir (early 1973)

Following more touring, the group became a quartet in early 1973
when Muir suddenly departed. This was initially thought to have
been due to an onstage injury – a dropped gong landing on his foot
during a gig at the Marquee.

Twenty-seven years later it was revealed that Muir had gone through
a personal spiritual crisis and had had to immediately withdraw
from the band, who themselves had not been told the truth about the
situation by their management. Bruford took on additional
percussion duties to compensate for the loss of Muir.

Starless And Bible Black - the power quartet (early
1973-early 1974)

Robert Fripp playing with King
Crimson, 1974

During the lengthy tour that followed, the remaining members began
assembling material for their next album, Starless and Bible Black,
released in January 1974, earning them a positive Rolling Stone review. The album built on
the achievements of its predecessor, precariously balancing
improvised material with careening heavy-metal riffs and songs that
recalled both the Beatles’ White Album experiments and
aspects of Miles Davis electric fusion. Two-thirds of the album was
instrumental, including Fripp’s climactic moto perpetuo composition
“Fracture”, the atonal sound painting of the title track and the
delicate “Trio”, a hushed and wistful improvised melody featuring
Wetton on bass, Cross on violin, Fripp on flute-Mellotron and
Bruford notoriously contributing “admirable restraint” by having
sat with his drumsticks crossed over his chest throughout the
piece, understanding that the music did not require him to add
anything.

Most of Starless and Bible
Black was recorded from live performances, but after
careful editing it was presented as another studio album . Careful
listening to the album reveals live acoustic dimensions and
faded-out applause. Fuller documentation of the quartet’s live work
was revealed eighteen years later on 1992’s four-disc live
recording The Great Deceiver, and again on 1998’s double
live album The Night Watch, which revealed the original
source tapes for much of the material on Starless And Bible
Black.

By this time, the band was once again beginning to divide into
performance factions. Musically, Fripp found himself positioned
between Bruford and Wetton, who played with such force and
increasing volume that Fripp once compared them to “a flying brick
wall”,) and Cross, whose amplified acoustic violin was increasingly
being drowned out by the rhythm section, forcing him to concentrate
more on keyboards. An increasingly frustrated Cross began to
withdraw musically and personally, with the result that he was
voted out of the group following the band's 1974 tour of Europe and
America, playing his final performance in Central Park in New York.

Red (1974)

The remaining trio reconvened to record a new album, which would be
called Red.
Unknown to the other two, Fripp, increasingly disillusioned with
the music business, had been turning his attention to the writings
of the mystic George Gurdjieff, and
experienced a spiritual crisis-cum-awakening immediately before the
band entered the studio. He would later describe his experience as
having seemed as if “the top of my head blew off.” Although most of
the album material had been written, the transformed Fripp
retreated into himself in the studio and “withdrew his opinion”,
leaving Bruford and Wetton to direct most of the sessions.

In spite of this, Red proved to be one of the strongest
and most consistent King Crimson albums to date. It has been
described as "an impressive achievement" for a group about to
disband, with "intensely dynamic" musical chemistry between the
band members that resulted in a record "aggressive and loud enough
to strip the wallpaper off your living room wall". Opening with the
harsh, tritone-based instrumental which gave the album its name
(and which has remained in the band’s live set ever since), the
album also featured two relatively short and punchy Wetton-led
songs, a last look back at the period with David Cross, – via the
live improvisation “Providence” from the preceding tour – and the
majestic twelve-minute “Starless”, which acted, in effect, as a
potted musical history of the band from Mellotron-driven ballad
grandeur via intense improvisation to savagely structured metallic
attack and back again. The album also included guest appearances by
former members and collaborators. In addition to Cross’s appearance
on “Providence”, Robin Miller and Marc
Charig returned on oboe and cornet for the first time since
Islands, and both Mel Collins
and Ian McDonald played
saxophones on “Starless” (at one point,
duetting with each other via overdubs).

Band "ceases to exist" (late 1974)

With one of their strongest albums ready to promote, King Crimson’s
future prospects looked bright, and talks were underway regarding
Ian McDonald rejoining the
band. However, Fripp - still processing his spiritual crisis - did
not want to tour as he felt that the "world was coming to an end" and was in any
case becoming discouraged by both the working relationships in the
band and by the realities of high-profile rock band activity (which
he increasingly saw as overblown and detrimental to both musicians
and audience).

Two months before the release of Red, Fripp announced that
King Crimson had "ceased to exist" and was "completely over for
ever and ever", The group formally disbanded on 25 September 1974.
Much later on, it was revealed that Fripp had attempted to interest
his managers in a Fripp-free version of King Crimson (consisting of
Wetton, Bruford and McDonald) but had been turned down.

USA posthumous live album (1975)

A posthumous live album, USA,
documenting this version of King Crimson's final tour of the United
States, was released in 1975 to critical acclaim, reviewers calling
it "a must" for fans of the band and "insanity you're better off
having".

Technical issues with some of the original tapes rendered some of
David Cross' violin parts inaudible when mixed in 1974, so Roxy Music’s Eddie
Jobson was brought in to provide studio overdubs of violin and
keyboards. Further edits were also necessary to allow for the time
limitations of a single vinyl album. The album was reissued with
two extra tracks, “Fracture” and “Starless”, in 2005.

Interim (1975-1980)

Following the assembly of USA, the band went their
separate ways. While McDonald joined Foreigner, Wetton would have stints in
Roxy Music and Uriah Heep before reuniting with Bruford in
UK and eventually becoming frontman for
Asia. Before and after his UK stint,
Bruford would play with his own jazz-fusion band, also called
Bruford, and drummed for Genesis on their first post-Peter Gabriel tour.

Fripp,
meanwhile, would toy with the idea of going into the priesthood but
would ultimately opt to become a “small, mobile intelligent unit”
and embrace a solo career which saw him move to New York City, where he would collaborate with Brian Eno, Blondie,
Talking Heads, The Roches and Daryl
Hall among others, as well as further developing his
Eno-inspired tape loop system of Frippertronics. He would also make
striking guitar contributions to the albums of David Bowie and Peter
Gabriel, even joining the latter on tour, and hone his
abilities as a producer.

In 1979, Fripp released his first solo album Exposure, sometimes
described as "an art-rock Sergeant Pepper".
Mixing songs with Frippertronics, and spiky instrumentals with tape
cut-ups, the album featured guest performances by assorted Fripp
collaborators and contemporaries including Brian Eno, Peter
Gabriel, Phil Collins, Darryl Hall, Peter
Hammill, Terre Roche and Barry Andrews. Notably for the future, several
of the bass parts on the album were played by Peter Gabriel's bass
player of choice – Tony Levin – who was
known as "one of New York City's most sought-after studio
musicians". Levin had played bass for Peter Gabriel, Paul
Simon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and many others. Fripp, who'd previously
worked with Levin both on Gabriel’s first three albums and on a
1977 tour, considered him to be a “master” player.

A second solo album, God Save the Queen/Under
Heavy Manners, was released in 1980, blending
Frippertronics with New Wave/funk rhythms in a fusion which Fripp
referred to as "Discotronics". The album featured contributions
from David Byrne, Busta Jones and Paul
Duskin.

In 1980, Fripp re-emerged with his “second-division beat band”
The League of Gentlemen,
a collaboration with Barry Andrews
(XTC, Shriekback),
Sara Lee (Gang Of Four, The B-52's) and successive drummers Johnny Toobad
and Kevin Wilkinson. Although short-lived, The League Of Gentlemen further
developed a dominant Fripp playing style of highly-disciplined and
interlocking rhythmic arpeggios, something which he had first
pioneered in King Crimson during 1973 (with “Fracture”) and which
would inform his next step.

1980s

King Crimson, lineup 4 (1981-1984)

A band called Discipline (early to late 1981)

By 1981, Fripp had opted to fold The League of Gentlemen in favour
of a project that was more artistically and commercially ambitious.
At the time, he had no intention of reforming King Crimson.
However, his first step was to contact Bill Bruford and ask if he
wanted to join a new band, to which Bruford agreed.

Fripp then contacted guitarist and singer Adrian Belew, who had previously worked with
David Bowie and Frank Zappa and whom Fripp had met when his
then-band Gaga had supported The League of Gentlemen. Belew
was, at the time, a major collaborator with Talking Heads both on record and on tour.
Fripp had never been in a band with another guitarist before, other
than his stint in Peter Gabriel's 1977 touring band, so the
decision to seek a second guitarist was indicative of Fripp's
desire to create a sound unlike any of his previous work. Belew
(who agreed to join the new band following his tour commitments
with Talking Heads) would also become
the band’s lyricist.

Having decided against selecting Bruford’s colleague Jeff Berlin as bass player (on the grounds that
his playing style was “too busy”), Fripp and Bruford resigned
themselves to a long search. To Fripp’s surprise, Tony Levin arrived on the third day of auditions,
and completed the band. Fripp confessed that, had he known that
Levin was available and interested, he would have selected him as
first-choice bass player without auditions. In addition to
his bass-playing contributions, Levin introduced the band to the
use of the Chapman Stick, a ten-string
polyphonic two-handed tapping instrument of
the guitar family which had both a bass and treble range and which
Levin played in an "utterly original style"

Fripp named the new quartet Discipline, and the
band flew to England to rehearse and write. They made their live
debut at Moles Club in Bath on April 30, 1981 and went on to tour
the UK, supported by The Lounge
Lizards.

Discipline becomes King Crimson (late 1981)

By October 1981, the four members of Discipline had made the
collective decision to ditch their original name and to reactivate
and use the name of King Crimson.

Belew’s striking arsenal of guitar sounds – utilising a broad range
of electronic effects and unorthodox
playing styles – was another new component of the band. It enabled
Fripp to concentrate more on complex picked arpeggios while Belew
provided a counterpoint including animal noises, industrial
textures, demented lead guitar screams, backward envelopes and
insectoid chatter – although Belew was more than capable of
handling his share of the crosspicked gamelan patterns. Within the
rhythm section, Levin brought elements of contemporary urban styles
to the basslines, while Bruford experimented, at Fripp’s behest,
with a cymbal-free drumkit. Although King Crimson’s trademark
Mellotrons were no longer present, Fripp’s rich and overdriven lead
guitar breaks provided a link to the past, with the new band also
having turned in animated versions of “Red” and “Larks’ Tongues in
Aspic, Part 2” during the original Discipline tour.

The Discipline album (late 1981)

The first album by the new lineup was 1981’s Discipline, an
immediate benchmark for the new sound and still considered to be
one of the band’s finest records. The songs were short and snappy
by King Crimson standards, with Belew’s pop sense and quirky
lyrical approach a surprising contrast to previous Crimson
grandeur. The music incorporated additional influences including
post-punk, latterday funk, go-go and African-styled
polyrhythms.

While the band’s previous taste for improvisation was now tightly
reined in, one of the album’s two instrumentals (the serene “The
Sheltering Sky”) had emerged unplanned out of group rehearsals. The
noisy, half-spoken/half-shouted “Indiscipline” had been partially
written in order to give Bruford a chance to escape from the strict
rhythmic demands of the rest of the album and to play against the
beat in any way that he could.

The Beat period (1982)

Discipline was followed in 1982 by Beat, which was both the
first King Crimson album to have been recorded with the same band
lineup as the album preceding it and the first not to have been
produced by a member of the group,

The album had a loosely-linked theme of the beat generation and its writings, reflected
in song titles such as "Neal and Jack and Me" (inspired by Neal Cassady and Jack
Kerouac), "The Howler" (inspired by Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl”)
and "Sartori in Tangier"
(inspired by Paul Bowles). Fripp had
asked Belew to read Keroauc's novel On
the Road. for inspiration, and the album was peppered with
themes of travel, disorientation and loneliness. While the record
was a noticeably poppier version of the Discipline
template (and contained the limpid ballads "Heartbeat" and "Two
Hands", the latter with lyrics by Belew’s wife Margaret), it also
featured the harsh, atonal and entirely improvised “Requiem”, which
was more reminiscent of the left-field work of King Crimson circa
Starless And Bible Black.

The recording process of Beat was fraught, with Belew
suffering high stress levels over his duties as frontman and main
writer of song material. On one occasion, he clashed with Fripp and
ordered him out of the studio. Fripp would later sardonically
comment “So much for my being the leader of King Crimson”.
Differences were soon resolved, however, and the band toured again,
followed by a recuperative time-out during which Belew recorded a
solo album.

Three Of A Perfect Pair (1984)

Reconvening to record Three
of a Perfect Pair in 1984, the band found the
compositional process hard and this time had difficulty reconciling
the disparate musical ideas of the four members. They ultimately
opted for a “two-sided” album consisting of “the left side” – four
of the band’s poppier songs and a melodical instrumental – and a
“right side” of experimental material which ranged from extended
and atonal improvisations in the tradition of the mid-70s band to a
third tightly-structured episode in the “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic”
sequence.

The “left side” songs had a loose lyrical theme – this time the
workings of the brain, from dysfunction to dream, and its impact on
life – while the “right side” had more of a preoccupation with
technological society, from the lengthy instrumental "Industry" to
the sprechstimme piece “Dig Me”, sung
from the viewpoint of a scrapped automobile) and saw the band experimenting with
more mechanistic sounds. The 2001 CD remaster of the album added
“the other side”, a collection of remixes and improvisation
outtakes plus Levin’s tongue-in-cheek vocal piece “The King Crimson
Barbershop”.

The last concert of the Three Of A Perfect Pair tour,
which was also the last concert played by the 1980s lineup, was
recorded and subsequently released in 1998 as the live album
Absent Lovers: Live
in Montreal.

Split (late 1984)

After Three of a Perfect Pair King Crimson disbanded,
relatively amicably. Belew would later refer to the band taking a
break which ultimately lasted for ten years.

Second interim (1985 to 1993)

During the next eight years, Levin would return to sessions and
ongoing work with Peter Gabriel, while
Bruford would form the electro-acoustic jazz band Earthworks with future British jazz stars
Django Bates and Iain Ballamy. Both maintained their association
as a bass-and-drums team, working together on David Torn's notably Crimsonic 1986 album
Cloud About Mercury and as the rhythm section for the
short lived Yes reunion project Anderson Bruford Wakeman
Howe.

Belew would pursue a diverse sessions and solo career plus work
with the guitar-pop quartet The
Bears and a return stint as David Bowie’s tour guitarist. He
would also score a surprise MTV hit with his 1989 single “Oh
Daddy”.

Fripp, meanwhile, moved straight from King Crimson into forming the
Guitar Craft music school in 1985. An
integrated exploration of performance, composition, discipline and
lifestyle, Guitar Craft was based around the acoustic guitar and
Fripp’s own New Standard Tuning,
drawing strongly on the philosophies of Gurdjieff and J.G.Bennett as well as the Alexander Technique, and led to a
large-scale acoustic performing group called The League Of
Crafty Guitarists.

In 1989, Fripp formed a new electric art-rock band with singer
Toyah Willcox, whom he had married in
1986. Called Sunday All Over The World, the band
also featured drummer Paul Beavis and
Chapman Stick player Trey Gunn, one of Fripp’s Guitar Craft students,
who had also been one of the players in The League Of Crafty
Guitarists. Sunday All Over The World was a short-lived project and
only released one album, 1989's Kneeling At The Shrine.
However, it did have the effect of further consolidating Fripp's
working relationship with Trey Gunn, who would go on to work on
virtually all of Fripp's projects for the next fourteen years. One
of the first of these was the Robert Fripp String
Quintet, for which Fripp and Gunn were joined by three of
Fripp's other students, the California Guitar Trio. The Quintet
toured America and Japan during 1992 and 1993 and recorded an album
in 1993 called The Bridge Between.

Since 1985, Fripp had also worked sporadically with former Japan singer David
Sylvian. In 1991, Fripp invited Sylvian to become the lead
singer for a possible reformation of King Crimson. Although Sylvian
declined the offer, he and Fripp formed a duo project under their
own names which resulted in the 1993 album The First Day
with a rhythm section of Gunn and former Peter Gabriel drummer Jerry Marotta. For the tour and the subsequent
live album Damage, former Mr
Mister drummer Pat Mastelotto
took over on drums. (Original King Crimson drummer Michael Giles had also auditioned.)

Prompted by a serious falling out with his management company and
record label EG, due to the latter’s
alleged financial mismanagement and failure to pay its artists,
Fripp also established his own record label Discipline Global Mobile. This
would have a strong impact on future business and projects for both
King Crimson and other related projects. In 1998, DGM would launch
the King Crimson Collector's Club, a service that regularly
releases live recordings from concerts throughout the band's
career, many of which are now available for download online.

1990s

King Crimson, lineup 5 (1994-1997)

Forming the Double Trio (circa early 1994)

At some point in the early 1990s, Adrian Belew visited Fripp in
England and strongly expressed his interest in playing in a
reformed King Crimson. Following the end of his tour with David
Sylvian, Fripp began restructuring the band, bringing Belew and
Levin back from the 1980s band while adding Trey Gunn on Chapman
Stick and Jerry Marotta on drums. In the early stages of planning,
Marotta was replaced by Pat Mastelotto.

The last addition to the lineup was Bill Bruford as second drummer.
Fripp explained the unexpected sextet arrangement by claiming to
have had the vision of a “double trio” (two guitarists, two
bass/Stick players and two drummers) to explore a different type of
King Crimson music. Bruford, however, would later assert that he
had lobbied his own way into the band, believing that King Crimson
was very much “his gig”, and that Fripp had come up with the
philosophical explanation later.

The "double trio" convened for rehearsals in Woodstock in 1994 and
released the EPVrooom in the same year.

The new King Crimson sound featured elements of the interlocking
guitars on Discipline and the heavy rock feel of
Red., with a greater use of ambient electronic sound and
ideas from industrial music. In contrast, many of the songs –
mostly written or finalised by Belew – displayed stronger elements
of 1960s pop than before – in particular, a Beatles influence). As with previous lineups,
new technology was used for, and informed, music. In this case, the
technology was MIDI, used extensively by Fripp,
Belew and Gunn, to which Gunn would add the Warr Guitar, a tapping guitar instrument with
which he would replace his Chapman Stick
post-VROOOM.

The apparent twinning of instruments was in fact used less than
initially suggested. Using Soundscapes, the greatly
expanded digital successor to Frippertronics, Fripp's guitar began to take
more of a textural and ambient role in many pieces; while Gunn’s
Stick or Warr Guitar, rather than staying in the bass register with
Levin, covered a proportion of the guitar arpeggios as well as
producing experimental and distorted sounds and triggering MIDI
sounds. The main use of twinned instruments was in the drumming,
with Bruford initially taking on a more exploratory role over
Mastelotto’s steady beat, although this soon shifted toward a more
equitable sharing of roles.

The revived band would make their live debut in Buenos Aires in
1995, recorded for the live album B'Boom: Live in Argentinaand
released in August of the same year. In addition to a large body of
new material, the band played three mid-70s pieces (“Red”, “Larks’
Tongues In Aspic Part 2” and “The Talking Drum”) and six songs from
the 1980s repertoire, predominantly from Discipline.

Thrak (mid-1995)

King Crimson released their next full-length studio album,
Thrak, in April 1995, containing
revised versions of most of the tracks on Vrooom.
Thrak was described as having "jazz-scented rock
structures, characterised by noisy, angular, exquisite guitar
interplay" and an "athletic, ever-inventive rhythm section", whilst
being in tune with the sound of alternative rock musicians in the
mid-1990s.

Examples of the band’s efforts to integrate their multiple elements
could be heard on the complex post-prog songs “Dinosaur” and “Sex
Sleep Eat Drink Dream” as well as the more straightforward “One
Time” and the funk-pop inspired “People”. Instrumentally, the album
featured a couple of clear descendants of the driving “Red”
(“VROOOM “ and “VROOOM VROOOM”), the drum duet “B’Boom”, the
savagely displaced and rhythmatic “THRAK” and a couple of brief
solo Soundscapes from Fripp. The album also featured the brief
return of Mellotron to the band’s sonic palette.

Thrakattak (1996)

During 1995 and 1996 King Crimson continued to tour. The band
released the challenging avantgarde live
album Thrakattak in 1996, which
consisted entirely of concert improvisations from the midsection of
performances of "THRAK", digitally combined into an hour-long
extended improvisation.

A more conventional live recording from the period was later made
available on the 2001 double CD release Vrooom Vrooom, as was a 1995 concert on
the 2003 Déjà Vrooom
DVD.

The Double Trio fractures (mid-1997)

Although musically exciting, the Double Trio was expensive and
cumbersome to run, which in turn led to insecurity. In mid-1997,
the band gathered for rehearsals in Nashville which came to a
compositional impasse. At this point, the friction between Fripp
and a particularly exasperated Bruford effectively ended the
latter’s time as a King Crimson member.

This, plus the lack of workable material and coherent group ideas,
could have broken the band up altogether. Instead, the six members
opted for an alternative solution - the ProjeKCts.

The ProjeKCts (mid-1997-1999)

Rather than split up absolutely, the six musicians of the Double
Trio decided to work in smaller "sub-groups" – or "fraKctalisations", according to Fripp – called
ProjeKcts. This enabled the group to
continue developing musical ideas and searching for Crimson's next
direction without the practical difficulty and expense of convening
all six members in one place at once.

The various ProjeKCts played live in the USA, Japan and the UK and
released a number of recordings which were in many respects similar
to the Thrakattak album, demonstrating the improvisational musical high wire act
that the constituent musicians were able to produce.. The ProjeKCt
albums were described by music critic Considine as "frequently astonishing" but
also as lacking in melody, and thus too
difficult for the casual listener.

As with previous King Crimson endeavours, the ProjekCts embraced
new technology – in this case, Mastelotto’s electronic drum loop
devices, Trey Gunn’s MIDI-triggered “talkbox” and the new
electronic Roland V-Drums played by
Mastelotto and Belew. (Significantly, Bruford declined to play the
V-drums despite Fripp’s request).

ProjeKct One (Fripp, Bruford, Gunn
and Levin) was assembled for a four-night stint in London. The band
took on an entirely improvised free-jazz direction and was
primarily led by the more jazz-inclined Bruford and Levin (who, for
this project, favoured acoustic drums and upright bass
respectively). This can also be seen as Bruford's final attempt to
work within a King Crimson context.

ProjeKct Two (Fripp, Gunn and
Belew) explored more Crimsonic instrumental structures with plenty
of MIDI triggering and virtual instrumentation (such as impossible
piano lines played via MIDI guitar) plus the unusual and
stimulating element of Belew playing electronic drums rather than
guitar. The music was generally more light-hearted and humorous
than most King Crimson-associated material.

ProjeKct Three (Fripp, Gunn and
Mastelotto) explored similar territory to ProjeKct Two but was a
much faster-paced experiment driven primarily by Mastelotto’s
multi-layered electronic rhythm approach (which drew extensively on
high-speed drum and bass and electronica)

ProjeKct Four (Fripp, Gunn,
Mastelotto and Levin) explored similar territory to ProjeKct Three, although it actually preceded
ProjeKct Three into action; however, the presence of Levin on bass
and Stick resulted in a much fuller "live band" sound and a more
driving avant-rock approach.

A fifth band, not named as a ProjeKCt but in certain respects
feeding into the same inspiration, was Bruford Levin Upper
Extremities (BLUE) in which the rhythm section of Bruford and
Levin worked with guitarist David Torn
and trumpeter Chris Botti in order to
play a particularly Crimsonic form of jazz-rock. BLUE can also be
seen as a development of ideas explored on Torn's 1986 album
Cloud About Mercury, for which Bruford and Levin had been
the rhythm section and Mark Isham had
played trumpet and keyboards.

Various King Crimson members have continued to create new ProjeKCts
to the present day, as and where necessary. The latest of these has
been ProjeKct Six (consisting of Fripp
on guitar and Soundscapes and Belew on drums, bass and guitar)
which played four shows in the north-eastern United States in 2006,
opening for Porcupine Tree One of
these shows was postponed due to the sudden death of Adrian Belew's
long-time friend and engineer, Ken Latchney.

2000s

King Crimson, lineup 6 (2000-2004)

Creating the Double Duo (2000)

By the time the ProjeKcts came to end, Bruford had entirely quit
King Crimson work to concentrate on Earthworks. Levin’s session career
commitments – mostly to Peter Gabriel
and Seal – were also obstructing
future King Crimson activity and he therefore withdrew from the
band. Fortunately, this fitted into Belew’s preference for a
smaller unit, while Fripp also stated that he still considered
Levin to be a King Crimson member, albeit for now an inactive
“fifth member”.

The remaining four active members of King Crimson - Belew, Fripp,
Gunn, and Mastelotto - continued with the band, sometimes referring
to themselves as the “Double Duo” in a tongue-in-cheek reference to
the previous line-up. Although it featured two-thirds of the
previous band’s personnel and no new members, this incarnation of
the band would be strongly distinct from the Double Trio and was
effectively a different, rather than reduced, lineup.

The altered membership and the experience of the ProjeKcts led to
changes in role. Gunn's work in King Crimson moved more towards a
bass player’s role – he would supplement his low-end Warr Guitar
playing with work on the baritone
guitar and Ashbory silicone-string
bass – while Mastellotto made a much greater use of
electronics. Once again, new technology was employed: the
electronic V-Drums and rhythm-loop machines used for the ProjeKCts)
and Belew would entirely embrace Fripp’s New Standard Tuning on guitar.

The ConstruKCtion Of Light (2000)

King Crimson recorded their next album, The ConstruKction of Light,
in Adrian Belew’s basement and garage near Nashville. The results
were released in 2000 and proved to be the band’s most hard-rocking
album to date. All of the pieces were metallic and harsh in sound,
similar to the work of contemporary alternative metal bands such as Tool, with a distinct electronic texture, a
heavy processed drum sound from Mastelotto, and a different take on
the interlocked guitar sound which the band had used since the
1980s. With the exception of a parodic industrial blues, sung by
Belew through a voice changer, under the pseudonym of “Hooter J.
Johnson”, the songs were unrelentingly complex and challenging to
the listener, with plenty of rhythmic displacement to add to the
harsh textures.

The album also contained a lengthy fourth instalment of the “Larks’
Tongues In Aspic” series and another piece, “FraKCtured”, which
effectively rewrote the 1973 piece “Fracture”. Fripp argued that
the original “Fracture” had been written for and interpreted by a
specific group of musicians, and that in order to pursue a similar
theme in 2000 it had been necessary to rewrite the music in
accordance with the skills and personalities of the current lineup.
This explanation, however, did not protect the album from criticism
for apparently lacking new ideas.

Although the whole band contributed to arrangements, the basic
material on The
ConstruKction of Light was almost entirely composed by
Belew (songs) and Fripp (instrumentals). To avoid creative
frustration, the band recorded a parallel album at the same time
under the name of ProjeKct X, called
Heaven and
Earth. This second album was conceived and led by
Mastelotto and Gunn (with Fripp and Belew playing subsidiary roles
in the band) and was a further development of the
polyrhythmic/dance music approach seen earlier in the ProjeKCts.
The album’s title track was also included as a bonus track on
The ConstruKCtion of Light. Like The ConstruKction of
Light, Heaven and Earth was criticised for an
apparent lack of new ideas.

Heavy ConstruKCtion and tour with Tool (2001)

King Crimson toured to support the records, releasing a live
document of the results as the triple live album Heavy ConstruKction. This showed
the band constantly switching between the structured album pieces
and ferocious ProjeKCt-style Soundscape-and-percussion
improvisations.

Level Five and Happy With What You Have To Be
Happy With (late 2001-2002)

Later in 2001, the band released a limited edition live EP called
Level Five, which featured three
new pieces. A version of “The Deception of the Thrush”, a ProjeKCt
track now regularly featuring in the live set, plus the new tracks
“Dangerous Curves” and “Virtuous Circle” suggested that the band
was heading back towards a broader dynamic including quieter, more
textural work.

In 2002, King Crimson released a new EP Happy With What You
Have to Be Happy With. This featured eleven tracks
(including a live version of “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part IV”)
and confirmed that the band were moving back towards greater
diversity. Half of the tracks were brief processed vocal snippets
sung by Belew, and the songs themselves varied between
deliberately-dumb heavy metal, gamelan-ish pop, Soundscapes and
more blues spoofing.

The Power To Believe (2003)

The two EPs both acted as work-in-progress reveals for King
Crimson’s 2003 album The Power
to Believe, which Fripp described as "the culmination of
three years of Crimsonising" and which was possibly the most
self-referential album of the band’s career. The album incorporated
reworked and/or retitled versions of “Deception of the Thrush” and
four of the EP tracks, plus a 1997 Soundscape with added
instrumentation and vocals, and also used lyrics from an Adrian
Belew solo song (“All Her Love Is Mine”) as a linking theme across
four songs. It did, however, confirm the band’s return to more
diverse songwriting and instrumentation, with a greater reliance on
space and Soundscapes and with Mastelotto using more ProjeKCt-style
percussion textures. Songs such as “EleKCtric” fused 1970s, 1980s
and twenty-first century Crimson styles, and the album ran the
gamut from metal to ambient.

Once again, the band toured to support the album, resulting in the
2003 live album EleKtrik:
Live in Japan, recorded in Tokyo.

Departure of Gunn and return of Levin (late 2003-early
2004)

In late November 2003, Trey Gunn announced
his departure from King Crimson. He would continue his active
association with Mastelotto in projects such as TU and KTU, as well as leading
his own band.

Tony Levin was subsequently reinstalled as King Crimson’s bass
player, reconvening with Fripp, Belew and Mastelotto for rehearsals
in early 2004. However, nothing followed on from this and while the
band did not formally split it was placed on hold for another three
years.

"On hold" (2004-2007)

Adrian Belew in 2006

By this point, Fripp was continually reassessing King Crimson in
view of his dislike of the music industry and what he saw as the
unsympathetic side of touring. While this did not break up the
band, it contributed to changes in approach.

During the four years of King Crimson inactivity, Fripp continued
to nurture the Discipline Global Mobile label and to tour solo
Soundscapes. Levin continued with sessions and his own Tony Levin
Band. Belew embarked on another round of solo career activity,
including work with his new Adrian Belew Power Trio, while
Mastellotto continued his side work with Trey Gunn (mostly in the
band TU) and others.

King Crimson, lineup 7 (late 2007-present)

A double-drum quintet (late 2007)

A new King Crimson line-up was announced in late 2007, consisting
of Fripp, Belew, Levin, Mastelotto, and a new second drummer –
Gavin Harrison (the band’s first new
British member since 1972). Although best known as the drummer for
Porcupine Tree, a position he
continues to hold alongside his King Crimson work, Harrison had a
formidable reputation as one of the best session drummers in the
music industry and had had a long career including work with
Level 42, The Lodge, Jakko Jakszyk,
Sam Brown and innumerable
others.

Most recent activity (2008-present)

The new five-man lineup began rehearsals in spring 2008. In August
of the same year, the band set out on a brief four-city tour in
preparation for the group's 40th Anniversary in 2009.

Live, the band revealed an increasingly drum-centric direction but
no new material or any extended improvisations. However, many of
the pieces from the back catalogue received striking new
arrangements, most notably the renditions of "Neurotica,"
"Sleepless," and "Level Five", all of which were given
percussion-heavy overhauls, presumably to highlight the return to
the dual-drummer format. On August 20, 2008, DGMLive issued a
download-only release of the August 7th, 2008 concert in Chicago,
with more recordings from the New York shows scheduled for
availability in the near future.

More rehearsals and shows had been intended for 2009, but these
were cancelled following scheduling clashes with various members'
other projects and developments with Fripp's own priorities. In a
June 2009 interview with Crawdaddy, Adrian Belew commented:

"My last communication with Robert (Fripp) is that he’s
got three things he wants to be doing right now: He wants to finish
all the litigation he has against everybody who owes us money, and
then he wants to try to pay off his debts, that’s second, and then
he wants to organize his life.

Those are his three points.

And I read between the lines that he doesn’t want to be
doing anything this year, but I have also read between the lines
that he still wants to do more after that.

So I asked him, “Does this mean that we are divorced?”
and he said, “Absolutely not!

As long as there is a monster margarita waiting for me,
I’ll be back.” So, I think that not this year, but probably next
year."

In August 2008, a line-up called Crimson Project with Adrian Belew,
Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto, Eddie
Jobson and Eric Slick (from the Adrian Belew Power Trio) played
a short set at a Russian festival.

Musical Style

Fripp has described King Crimson as "a way of doing things", among
other quotes he has used to describe the project throughout the
decades with many changes in membership, configuration, and
instrumentation.

Musical themes

While the group constantly creates new sounds and new pieces,
several themes have remained constant from the earliest versions of
the band to the present.

The most obvious of these themes is composition by the use of a
gradually building rhythmic motif. The Holst piece Mars
that the original King Crimson played is a clear example of this,
with its complex pulse in 5/4 time over which strings and winds, or
mellotron in the case of King Crimson,
play a skirling melody. This piece evolved into "The Devil's
Triangle", based on variations of the central theme of
Mars, split into three parts which were increasingly
removed from the original Mars, on the In the Wake of
Poseidon album. It was followed by many other forms, from "The
Talking Drum" in 1973 (on Larks' Tongues in Aspic),
"Industry" in 1984 (on Three of a Perfect Pair) all the
way to "Dangerous Curves" in 2003 (on The Power to
Believe).

A second recurring theme is an instrumental piece (often embedded
as a break in a song) in which the band plays a passage of
considerable rhythmic and polyrhythmic
complexity. One of King Crimson's best-known songs, 21st Century Schizoid Man, is
an early example. The series of pieces collectively titled
Larks' Tongues in Aspic, as well as pieces of similar
intent, such as "Thrak" and "Level Five", go deeper into
polyrhythmic complexity, delving into rhythms that wander into and
out of general synchronisation with each other, yet through
polyrhythmic synchronisation all 'finish' together. These
polyrhythms are abundant in the band's 1980s work, which contained
gamelan-like rhythmic layers and continual staccato patterns overlaying each other.

Another theme is the composition of difficult passages for
individual instruments, especially Fripp's guitar, notably during
"Fracture" on Starless and Bible Black. Other themes
includes pieces with a loud, aggressive sound not unlike heavy metal music, and the juxtaposition
of ornate tunes and ballads with unusual, often dissonant
noises.

Improvisation

From the beginning, King Crimson performances featured improvisations. These
improvisations can be embedded into loosely-composed pieces such as
"Moonchild" or "Thrak", and even "very structured pieces". Most of
the band's performances over the years have included at least one
stand-alone improvisation where the band simply started playing and
took the music wherever it went, sometimes including passages of
restrained silence, as with Bill Bruford's
contribution to the improvised "Trio". The earliest example of an
unambiguously improvising King Crimson on record is the spacious,
oft-criticised extended coda of "Moonchild" from In the Court
of the Crimson King,.

What differentiates King Crimson's approach from most other jazz
and rock groups (although a slightly similar method was initially
used by their contemporaries Weather
Report) is that Crimson's improvisation avoids the notion of
one soloist at a time taking centre stage while the rest of the
band lays back and plays along with established rhythm and chord
changes. Rather, King Crimson improvisation is a group affair, a
kind of organic music-making process in which each member of the
band is able to make creative decisions and contributions as the
music is being played. Individual soloing is largely eschewed; each
musician is to listen to each other and to the group sound, to be
able to react creatively within the group dynamic.

David Cross once described the process in this manner:

"We're so different from each other that one night
someone in the band will play something that the rest of us have
never heard before and you just have to listen for a
second.

Then you react to his statement, usually in a different
way than they would expect.

It's the improvisation that makes the group amazing for
me.

You know, taking chances.

There is no format really in which we fall
into.

We discover things while improvising and if they're
really basically good ideas we try and work them in as new numbers,
all the while keeping the improvisation thing alive and continually
expanding."

With this approach, Fripp stresses the "magic" metaphor; to him,
when group improvisation of this sort really clicks, it is white magic.

Unlike most rock improvisation or jamming, these sessions are rarely jazz or
blues-based. They vary so much in sound that King Crimson has been
able to release several albums consisting entirely of improvised
music, such as the Thrakattak album. Occasionally,
particular improvised pieces will be performed in different forms
at different shows, becoming more and more refined and eventually
appearing on official studio releases
(the most recent example being "Power to Believe III", which
originally existed as the stage improvisation "Deception of the
Thrush", a piece played onstage for a long time before appearing on
record).

Influence on other bands

King Crimson have been influential both on the early 1970s
progressive rock movement and numerous contemporary artists.

First-wave progressive rock bands such as Genesis and Yes
were directly influenced by the band's initial style of symphonic
mellotron rock, and some aspects of the work of Emerson, Lake & Palmer can be
seen as Greg Lake's attempt to continue
the early work of King Crimson in his subsequent band. The veteran
Canadian hard rock/progressive rock band Rush cites King Crimson as a strong early
influence on their sound (drummer Neil Peart specifically credits
the adventurous and innovative style of original King Crimson
drummer Michael Giles as a very important influence on his own
approach to percussion).

Nirvana are known to have been
influenced by King Crimson as a result of Kurt Cobain having mentioned the importance of
the Red album to him.

Tool are widely held to have been
heavily influenced by King Crimson, with their vocalist Maynard James Keenan even joking on a
tour with them that "Now you know who we ripped off. Just don't
tell anyone, especially the members of King Crimson."

King Crimson have frequently been cited as heavy metal
pioneers. Members of both Iron Maiden
and Mudvayne have cited King Crimson as an
influence. The angular, dissonant guitar patterns associated with
Fripp’s distinctive approach are also evident in the music of
Thrash-Metal pioneers Voivod,
especially in the band’s mid-period work. Voivod also did a cover
of "21st Century Schizoid Man" on their 1997 recording
Phobos.

Also it should be noted that the range of personel that went
through the ranks of King Crimson went on to other notables bands.
Greg Lake in Emerson, Lake ,and Palmer. Ian Mcdonald co-founder of
Foreinger, Boz Burrell in Bad Company, Bill Bruford who came from
Yes then to return in 1974, John Wetton in the supergroup
Asia,which itself had members from Yes, ELP and The Bugles. If
nothing else, King Crimson was a breeding ground for talent and
self expression.

Membership

Greg Lake, 1978

King Crimson has had 18 musicians pass through its ranks as full
band members. Many others have collaborated with the band at
various points in lyric-writing, the studio and in live
performance. Most of the musicians who have been members of King
Crimson had notable musical careers outside the band, to the extent
that it has been calculated that there are over a thousand releases
on which members and former members of King Crimson appear.

Margaret Belew - source text for "Indiscipline" (on
Discipline) and lyrics for "Two Hands" (on Beat).
(Margaret Belew was an artist and was also Adrian Belew's wife
during the time of King Crimson lineup 4).

Reissues

In 1999, Robert Fripp collaborated with Virgin Records on a gradual
reissue of the complete pre-1994 King Crimson catalogue. Various
"definitive editions" followed.

DGM has announced details of the first three reissues in the
revamping of the King Crimson back catalogue, to be released in
September and October 2009 as CD/DVDA editions. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree has been working on these over
the past year, restoring the multi-track tapes from the best
possible sources, remixing the albums into 5.1 surround sound,
mixing unreleased tracks and alternate takes from the master tapes
for the first time, and in some cases also creating new stereo
mixes that enhance the sonics of the originals significantly. All
of this work has been personally overseen by Robert Fripp, who also
took part in the stereo remixing. The first three titles are
Red, In the Court of the Crimson King (released
as close to the exact 40th anniversary of its original release as
possible), and Lizard.